Ben Chertoff and Carl Hoffman at Popular Mechanics are live blogging the public announcement of NASA's exploration architecture from NASA HQ. Chertoff's calling it NASA's "lunar retread."

[Update at 1:15 PM EDT]

Griffin on commercial contractors:

...when you use a prime contractor in the traditional way it IS more expensive, but at least you know that you'll get what you ask for. We don't want to get in a position where we ask for something and they can't make it happen.

Yeah, they cost more, but we all know that prime contractors never fail to come through.

I'm with Hoffman:

Only one question about commercial space activities - Rutan, X prize, Bezos, Elon Must [sic], who's about to launch his first rocket with commercial payload into orbit for a reported $16 million - that was never mentioned by Griffin himself. And that has to make you wonder whether anything has changed at all...

Cute! You can tell that they're new to the idea...

I doubt that Falcon 1 would be very useful to the VSE. Falcon 9 would only be if NASA were to go for a massive Earth orbit assembly scheme which it doesn't seem to be disposed to do. Of course, if Elon were really bold, he might imagine a heavy lifter--say--Falcon 11.

Mark,

I don't think that use of an EELV class launcher automatically means massive on-orbit assembly. It could just mean dry launch and on-orbit propellant delivery. I'm sure this has its challenges, but the advantages seem compelling: It allows currently under-utilised launchers to play a part, allows entry of new players (assuming they can field something competitive) and avoids reliance on a single-solution architecture for the launcher.

Rob.

Government people will likely assume that the old way is the best way until sometime after commercial space providers are regularly ferrying people into orbit and beyond. Let's just hope that comes sooner rather than later.